Historically, pitting machines have yielded a small percentage of fruit whose pit or portion of a pit remained in the fruit piece. A typical mechanism for removing a fruit pit or pit material has been the use of a punching needle that passes through the fruit, engages the pit or pit material, and ejects the pit or pit material from the individual fruit piece. One cause of missed pits or missed pit material has been that the pit is not centered beneath the punching needle such that the pit or pit material is too far to one side of the fruit piece. Other times, the missed pit or missed pit material breaks, leaving a portion of the pit or pit material in the fruit piece. Another source of a missed pit or missed pit material is the difficulty of adequately detecting the presence of a missed pit or missed pit material in fruit pieces that have passed through a pitting machine.
Producers, buyers, sellers and consumers of pitted fruits are highly discouraged by the presence of any remaining pits or pit material in pitted fruits. Increasingly, producers, buyers and sellers of pitted fruits are hesitant to market the fruit due to an increased number of lawsuits by consumers who have tragically bit into one of these left over pits and reaped a broken tooth or other malady. Producers, buyers and sellers have tried to minimize the occurrence of tragic missed pit or pit material events by having manual laborers check the fruit pieces after the fruit pieces have been processed through pitting machines. This process is labor intensive, expensive and unreliable.